How Fast Can a Domestic Cat Run?

The fastest animal on Earth is a cat. Not the domestic one, though. It’s the cheetah who can accelerate up to a speed of 75 mile per hour which equals 120km/h. Astonishing. But how fast can a domestic cat run?

So we asked for a help of our local police officers with a radar and found out that, while normally cats walk on average at a speed of 2 mph (3.3 km/h), but during the spurts, some cats can reach top speed up to 30 miles per hour, which is close to 45 km/h.

It actually is faster than Usain Bolt, who during his world record run (his current one, set in 2009), achieved 27.78 mph (44.71 km/h).

But can we say cats are faster than Usain Bolt? No, because, let’s be realistic, most household cats are not up to condition to achieve a top speed, but fair is fair, not all humans are able to achieve the top speed of Usain Bolt either.

In cats, similarly like in Usain Bolt, the top speed is reserved for short spurts exclusively. The strategies used by domestic cats is that they wait in an ambush, or slowly approach their prey, and then, when they are in the distance of one or few jumps, they attack, and even then, not always necessarily reaching the top speed.